bugging

Pluralbuggings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The covert monitoring of conversations or communications using concealed electronic listening devices.

   Investigators confirmed that the bugging had captured months of private phone calls.

   Corporate bugging of a rival's boardroom led to a major lawsuit.

   Similarwiretapping, eavesdropping, surveillance, snooping

   Note

   The noun works both as a practice and as a countable operation. As a practice it takes no plural (bugging was widespread). For separate operations, buggings is natural, as in John H. Davis's The Kennedys: Dynasty and Disaster (1993): "The buggings executed by the FBI." Keep it apart from wiretapping. Bugging plants a concealed microphone or transmitter, while wiretapping intercepts signals already traveling over a line.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of bug.

   Stop bugging your sister and finish your homework.

   He spent the afternoon bugging the senator's office with hidden microphones.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every meaning of the verb, from the informal 'annoy' (that noise is bugging me) to planting listening devices, and it doubles the final g of bug. As a gerund it still takes an object: bugging the office was a crime. Once it drops the object and accepts a plural, as in buggings, it has become the surveillance noun.

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